(Credits: Raph Pour-Hashemi)
Tue 20 January 2026 13:00, UK
Anyone who has ever practised guitar can only hope to do a fraction of what Brian May could do when working with Queen.
Although he isn’t going to be the same kind of ferocious player that Steve Vai or even Eddie Van Halen was, his strong suit was always in writing the best hooks for songs and managing to create an entire symphony out of only one guitar. But even if the last few years have seen him celebrating the legacy of Queen and getting his solo career off the ground, there will always be those few songs that give him that rush of adrenaline every single time they play.
Then again, it’s easy to separate the individual members on Queen records if you know what to look for. There’s a distinct Queen sound that defines every single one of their tunes, but when listening to May’s songs, they were a lot more indebted to the heavier side of music than everyone else. Freddie Mercury could make some of the most ridiculous camp anyone had ever heard, and John Deacon would forever be the soulful side of the band, but if there was ever a heavy guitar lick that kicked off the song, you could bet that it was May’s handiwork.
Granted, it’s not like he was a one-trick pony, either. Several of his songs had the potential to be singles, but when you have a once-in-a-generation like ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ on the same album as the folksy ditty ‘39’, no one was exactly shocked to see it sink like a stone compared to everything else. But that kind of competition also brought out the best in May when working on his other tunes.
‘Tie Your Mother Down’ was his attempt at matching what Mercury did on the song ‘Death on Two Legs’, and while that musical “battle” is a lot closer than anyone realised, May made an unbeatable intro when he wrote ‘We Will Rock You’. The song was about as simple a Queen song as anyone could get, but when listening to the way that the audience reacted to it, it’s no big shocker how well it caught on.
Any band hopes to get the audience involved when they play a show, and since all anyone needed to do was clap and stomp their way through the song, all May needed to do was make the audience erupt the minute that he hit that power chord at the end of the song. The tune is one of the most engaging sing-alongs of all time, but even if it took a while to get together in the studio, May didn’t realise how much he loved it until he started playing it with other bands.
It might be the soundtrack to every single sporting match to this day, but even with that incessant rhythm pounding into your head, the song has yet to wear out its welcome with May, saying, “It’s just an easy thing to play. It’s got a lot of slog in it. It’s got a lot of energy and power. And not too much thought! And it’s something which is… just, there. And it’s always a nice place to go.”
Granted, every band has those few songs where they practically can’t go wrong with, either. The roof is always going to come off the place when Pink Floyd plays ‘Comfortably Numb’, and Paul McCartney probably wouldn’t be let out of any stadium if he didn’t play ‘Hey Jude’, but even with nothing to work with but his limbs, May took the basic elements of rock and roll and paired them down to their most elemental foundations.
The genre was never supposed to be the most sophisticated thing in the world, but what May proved to everyone was that no one needed to be a proficient musician to move people. All they needed was a song in their heart, and as long as they were able to scream out at the top of their lungs, anyone could turn ‘We Will Rock You’ into one of the most powerful songs any crowd had ever heard.
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